Details: Day – 16th May 2016; Time – 6-7.30; Place – 43 Gordon Square. Sign up for a free place through Birkbeck Arts Week

Isabel Davis and Anna Burel will introduce their project, Conceiving Histories, and present a curious case study: an unusual and short-lived late eighteenth-century fashion for ‘The Pad’, which remodelled the female figure to simulate pregnancy.

We will be looking at some contemporary literary texts and satirical cartoons which celebrated or satirised this strange, prosthetic addition.

The fashion is satirised here in a cartoon by Isaac Cruikshank in which women choose their pad – to simulate different lengths of gestation or, in the case of the lady in the far right of the image, twins – from a boutique: